Residents 2018

The Singapore landscape is constantly being reshaped by successive waves of development. However, the traces of what existed before often remain, perhaps in the form of unexplained empty grass patches, steps that lead nowhere, edible plants or cash crops subsumed into the forest, or as place names -- official or even less tangibly as unofficial vernacular names. The current landscape also includes many informal footpaths that have developed and are used in parallel to the explicit design of the built environment. Where do they lead? Who uses them and for what purpose? How do the Past and the Present intersect in the form of these unseen paths?

This residency will take the form of a series of on-site experiments or explorations in specific locations, with all participants contributing and gaining from each other. Over the course of the residency, Chua and the residency group will examine different ways of mapping and re/presenting not only the visible and the historical, but also sensory, imaginative, emotional and spiritual landscapes. Explorations can approach the city and history on different scales of distance and time, and from different perspectives.

Lead Resident: Dr. Chua Ai Lin

Chua Ai Lin is the Vice President of the Singapore Heritage Society, having served as its president (2013-2017), and a member of the Society since 1996. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge (UK) and was previously an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore, specialising in Singapore social and cultural history. Currently, she serves as a member of the National Library Advisory Committee, and in the past has been on the advisory board of the National Heritage Board and on the former UNESCO Singapore Sub-Commission on Culture and Information. In 2012, she was the first Singapore representative on the Cultural Heritage Preservation project of the International Visitor Leadership Programme organised by the United States of America’s State Department. She has published in Modern Asian Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and BiblioAsia among other journals, and is active in bringing heritage news and information to a wider public through running online platforms such as Singapore Heritage Yahoogroup (since 2000), and more recently, Facebook groups such as Heritage Languages of Singapore.

Mohamed Ismail Muhammad Fauzy

Fauzy aspires to be an applied academic and takes a keen interest in the grey spaces of architecture where nobody can quite plan their functions. He loves fashion and religion but the two worlds don’t exactly collide. He prefers to walk on the well-trodden desire path than the pavement.

Through the residency, he hopes to experience thirdspaces and uncover the desire line of the city showing the public's embrace of dissent. Thereby using the opportunity to link thirdspace with the concept of human agency to remonstrance unequal power relations through place making.

Jeremy Lee (Hell Low)

Hell Low is a Singaporean singer-songwriter. Hell Low’s music is steeped in melancholia. Like words in a diary, his lyrics are a mirror to a soul drawn into despondency by the rituals of living and dying in Singapore. Inspired by nostalgia, politics and HDB estates, Hell Low wants to write the next great national day song... or die trying.

Hell Low wants to meet new people and learn from them. He wants to listen to new ideas and see different points of view. He wants to then take the things that he has learnt and communicate them with others.

See Kian Wee

Fascinated by humanity’s need for storytelling, Kian Wee’s art practice explores the relationship between the society, its myth-making mechanisms, and the different resulted forms of narratives such as rumours and folklores. Working primarily with photography, he looks into its efficacy as a form of myth-making tool, which often bridges into other visual and sensory media.

He has a training in landscape design and degree in Fine Arts at LASALLE, and was a participant of Shooting Home 2015. His works were exhibited and published in NOISE 2015, Artistry, and Ace House(Yogyakarta) in 2017. Kian Wee also photographs for both events and portraiture commercially as a freelance photographer in Oddinary Studios.

Continuing his current research on an abandoned quarry in Singapore, Kian Wee hopes to explore and see the site from a different perspective through the residency exchange and research. Experimenting with various artistic methodologies, he plans to contemplate on how narratives interchange between fact and fiction within an abandoned autonomous space such as this.

Juria Toramae

Juria is a visual artist and photographer based in Singapore. Having spent her formative years moving between countries, she has become deeply interested in place attachment, displacement, natural and cultural heritage. In her work these themes interweave in a multitude of relationships and form realities that are grounded in social memories.

During the residency, she intends to further her research on Singapore’s outlying islands by way of mapmaking.